Pennies for Wink Publishing

The articles have once again begun to flow!

There was an interruption of service brought on by a new version of ArticleMS (V2.3), the directory software that I use on the sites. The update broke the script that SYA used to insert articles into the database. Since the version change there have been several tweaks to the new software that have made it difficult to update the script. Submit Your Article found an other way to deliver your articles and I have finally gotten onto the list to receive articles into most of my directories.

There have been some changes to the AMS script, but mostly under the hood. The code base was extensively updated and some things that did not work before now work. The counters on your articles do seem to be working now. In the past the view counter remained at zero even if you had article views. The email system also seems to be working better, but mostly from an administrative viewpoint. I am now getting notifications of events that I was not getting previously.

The other significant news is that I have purchased a domain name for my most general directory, Information Please Articles. I had installed it in sub-domain space when I first set it up. It had been poorly indexed as a sub-domain site and was not of great value to you or to me. Since the move to the .com TDL Google has been indexing the content at a furious pace. When I checked recently there were over 38,000 results shown. In the old sub-domain space the most pages ever indexed was around 2,500. The byline for the directory is ‘A Quality Article Directory‘. The move to its own domain name has been a big step in making this true.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind you to promote your articles. In the top nav bar there is a ‘ShareIt’ button that provides links to the major bookmarking and social media sites. Just mouse over the ‘ShareIt’ button if the icon for your favorite bookmarking or social media site is not directly shown. I have made suggestions about grabbing your author RSS feed and pinging your articles in the past as well, and these are still good and easy ways to promote your articles. All of these methods can improve the indexing of your articles and the associated links. Remember, a link is not a backlink until it is indexed!

Thank You to SYA and to YOU the authors that produce the content.

There is a new update available for WordPress! This brings the version number to 3.1.

The update appears to break the popular AllInOneSEO plugin. All in one is not able to pull the title, description, or keywords from the new update. I am sure that there will be an update from All in One soon.

My advice is to hold off on this WP update until the All in One update is available if you use that plugin. All in One typically produces an update within 24 hours if there are problems. Just check to be sure that there is an AiO update available before doing the WP update. I will post a quick note when it is published.

I am declaring the new Social Bookmarking site open for business. There are still some tweaks that I need to do as soon as I find my way around the template a bit better, but I have achieved most of my design objectives and need to start adding some content.

As soon as there are a few members and some content to show I will begin to promote the site to help it get indexed. I will be adding links to some of my other sites and pages, but some article bookmarks and some members voting on the listings would help. I am including a link in my ‘article approved’ emails to facilitate bookmarking your articles directly.

Copy the article url from your email and click on the link to I Found It – Here’sTheSite. Just login or register for your account. (Note to Self: Register an user account so that I know about the registration process.) When you are logged in paste the article url in the box on the first screen. The software will pull your page title and description from your site, but you may edit those if you wish. For your articles you may want to use something similar to your article summary. Fill in the reCaptcha code and click  the ‘Preview and Submit’ button. You will be taken to a page with your formatted submission and a ‘Submit’ button. Click the submit button and that job is finished.

Your submission will appear on the ‘Upcoming News’ page. While you are on the site please check the upcoming stories page. If any of the articles catch your eye please enter a vote for them. When an article receives a few votes it is moved to the ‘Published News’ page, the home page of the site. The links on the upcoming stories page are NoFollow but the links on the published news page should be DoFollow links. According to the developer it is set up this way to discourage spammers. I will be checking as soon as stories begin to hit the front page and make adjustments as necessary to insure that your links can become do follow. (Don’t tell anybody, but I may vote up a couple of my submissions so that there is something on the home page. I would rather that you take care of that, though.)

As I write this the only category is ‘News’. I will add categories for articles, blog posts, and an I Found It category for other pages. These may or may not be done by the time that you read this  post. If you have any suggestions for other good categories please leave a comment to this post. (Right now comments are open for two weeks from the post date, if it seems important I will relax that rule.)

One other suggestion that I would like to advance is that you send a link to your lists or publish a link to the site somewhere. Traffic to the site (and links) will help everybody! If you have loyal followers you could suggest that they register and vote on your submissions. The site link is: http://www.heresthesite.com/

As I have threatened I have added a share button to the pages of my article directories. I placed the buttons in the nav bar at the top of the page.

The buttons look like this:

They are displayed in the nav bar at the top of the page after the RSS link. I  had originally thought to put them on the article pages, but a forum I visit has them in the nav bar and so I thought, why not? If a visitor arrives at the home page they should see the buttons on their initial scan of the page and know where to find them. If they arrive directly to an article I think that they should also see them.

There are four direct access buttons that appear to be somewhat random, but FaceBook and Myspace have shown up in all cases that I have noticed. If you mouse over the + button or the word share a dropdown box opens with the most popular options directly available. If you click on the more button a pop-up opens with a full list of bookmarking sites, over 300 choices. This is the service from AddThis.com. If you have a site and would like to add a share button they have several options from which to choose.

The buttons make it very easy to social bookmark a page. The social bookmarking sites get crawled very often. Bookmarking an article is a good way to improve the chances that the article (and your links) get indexed. When you get an ‘article approved’ email I suggest that you take a minute to visit the article and place a bookmark or two.

PS: I use this article script in places on several of my sites. I have set the bookmark buttons at the top of the left nav column on some of those sites. If you have a minute check out the page on the PC App Store site and tell me if you think that location is better or if you like the way it is done in the nav bar better. Thanks!!

Do you have a WordPress blog? WordPress pushed out their latest update last night. Following close on its heels is an update for Akismet, the useful anti-spam plugin that comes bundled with WP.

It is always a good idea to update to the latest version whenever there is an update available. The new version number for WordPress is 3.0.5. If you are running an earlier version you really should update. WordPress updates often offer improved security as well as any bug fixes that are needed.

It is not uncommon for updates to your plugins to be released when there is a WP update. If you have not updated WP already, after you do the update click on your plugins icon and check for updates. Either the update will be listed under Akismet or there will be a notification that an update is available in the line at the top of the page. Other plugins may be updated soon, but I feel that it is important to do the update to WP and then update the plugins if necessary, rather than waiting for the dust to clear.

Have you done the update, yet??

SiteMaps have now been submitted to Google for all of my active article directories. The general directory, InformationPlease, has over 18,500 articles listed in the site map. I am looking in to submitting them to Bing and Yahoo as well.

InformationPlease was created on new sub-domain space. I have seen GoogleBot active on the site whenever I look at the server logs, but there are not too many articles indexed at this time. I am hoping that the sitemap will improve the situation. The niche directories are attached to sites that have been active for some time. They may be in slightly better shape, but still could use a boost.

I have a good deal of work to do to promote these sites. Many of the articles that are now indexed were mentioned on social media sites. I saw a case were someone listed a link to an article on Craig’s list and in less than 12 hours it was listed in Google’s index. Taking a few minutes to promote your articles on these sites can pay off for you and for the community. If your article is not indexed your links have no value. If the directory gains importance there will be more link juice for all.

I have begun a program of pinging the directory feed each time that the directory is updated. I am using Ping-O-Matic for my pinging service. Ping-O-Matic saves a page for the ping and to reping the feed all I need to do is open the page.

It does appear that there is a bit more bot activity on the sites. The directory traffic has also been improving so there may be some direct benefit from the pinging program. I am hoping that with frequent reminders I will begin to see better indexing of the content on these directories.

An author on one of my directories pointed out to me that I had no xml site map. I knew this was the case, but manually building site maps for frequently updated article directories is beyond my capabilities. The directory in question has around 18,500 articles and adds around 100 articles a day via the SubmitYourArticle subscription service.

I checked the forum for the article CMS that I am using and found a script to automate the site map building. I tested the script and it worked fine. Other posters had offered some improvements and I intend to check those out as well. I can do a manual call for an update as it is, but that job can be automated. There is also a hint of a method to g-zip the sitemap and that may be of value. I have a bit more testing to do.

When everything is fully operational I will submit my new sitemaps to the major search engines. This should help with getting the pages and articles indexed. It will be a beautiful thing for all of us!

Thanks, Josh!